Since the merchandise service life decreases recently due to a variety of merchandise items, and customization service orientation of consumers who use the Internet strengthens, the necessity of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has received a great deal of attention. These methods aim at increasing the customer satisfaction and winning and networking new customers.
The one-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing. Personal attribute information such as the age, sex, hobby, taste, and purchase log of each customer is stored as a database. The contents of the information are analyzed, and a proposal that meets customer's needs is presented. A typical method is variable print. Along with the recent progress in DTP (DeskTop Publishing) technology and the spread of digital printers, variable print systems have been developed, which customize and output a document for each customer. Such a system is required to optimally lay out and display contents in information quantity that changes for each customer.
In a conventional variable print system, containers (also called field regions in a document form) are laid out on a document as regions where pieces of information are displayed. A database and the containers are associated with each other to achieve layout display.
However, each container serving as a partial display region in which a text or image is to be pasted has a fixed size. For this reason, when data in the database is inserted in the container, and the data size is larger than the container size, text overlap or image clipping occurs. If the data size is smaller than the container size, a space is formed in the container. In either case, optimum layout display corresponding to the information amount of a text or image to be displayed cannot be implemented.
To solve this problem, automatic layout systems which change the container size in accordance with the information amount have been proposed. An automatic layout system can flexibly set the container size of a text or image. Some automatic layout systems can set a variable container size and increase the container size in accordance with the amount of data to be inserted. In another technique, if text data larger than a fixed container size is inserted, the font size of the text is reduced to display the entire text in the container.
However, when the size of a container is increased, it overlaps another container on the document. When the font size is adjusted in text data with a large amount, the font size becomes too small. Another automatic layout technique to solve these problems is disclosed in the “layout design apparatus” of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 07-129658. This document is referred as the patent document 1, hereinafter. In this technique, when the size of a container is increased, the size of another container adjacent to it is reduced.
However, the layout design apparatus described in the patent document 1 manages the priority orders of layout materials. A layout is determined by laying out materials in accordance with the priority order. The apparatus only determines the layout order of unit materials. Since the material with lowest priority is always laid out in a narrow region, the layout desired by the user cannot be obtained. In the automatic layout system described in the patent document 1, the priority order is determined by the type of material. For this reason, when the layout is calculated automatically on the basis of the size of data in the database, the user cannot specifically set how to change the size of each container. For example, assume that two variable containers A and B are present, and data from a database are inserted in them. If both the data inserted in the containers A and B are too large to fit in the page, the mechanism described in patent reference 1 determines the layout on the basis of the priority order set by the type of material. If the priority order is set in order of image, graphic, and text data, the size and position of the container A which receives, e.g., image data are determined first. Then, the size and position of the container B which receives text data are determined.
Even when the user wants to display (print) a specific container created in the document to be created with priority over remaining containers independently of the type of the content to be inserted in the container, the automatic layout system of patent reference 1 determines the predetermined priority order on the basis of the type of content. Even when a content which should have a greater appeal than remaining contents independently of the content type is inserted in a container, the size of the container is determined in consideration of the types of remaining contents. That is, each container cannot preferentially be laid out independently.
It is also impossible to set equal priority orders and determine the layout by increasing the size of each container on the basis of the size of a content inserted in it and changing the sizes of a plurality of containers relative to each other.